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Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
page 57 of 376 (15%)
Yet it must not be supposed that Coleridge was an unhappy boy. He was
naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement, swimming, he
excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed, and probably
with truth, that his health was seriously injured by his excess in
bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the New River in
his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like. But reading was
a perpetual feast to him. "From eight to fourteen," he writes, "I was a
playless day-dreamer, a "helluo librorum", my appetite for which was
indulged by a singular incident: a stranger, who was struck by my
conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King Street,
Cheapside."--"Here," he proceeds, "I read through the catalogue, folios
and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running
all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to
have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a
continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every
object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny comer, and
read, read, read,--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a
mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it
into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"--"My talents
and superiority," he continues, "made me for ever at the head in my
routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a
spark of ambition; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but
the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and
exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me
and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book
knowledge and book thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age for
getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as
pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and
idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of being flattered.
However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated."
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